Sharing Oracle Database Learnings

Brief introduction to ASM mirroring

Automatic Storage Management (ASM) is becoming the standard for good reasons. Still, the way it mirrors remains a mystery for many customers I encounter, so I decided to cover it briefly here.

ASM Basics: What does normal redundancy mean at all?

It means that every stripe is mirrored once. There is a primary on one disk and a mirror on another disk. All stripes are spread across all disks. High redundancy would mean that every primary stripe has two mirrors, each on another disk. Obviously, the mirroring reduces the usable capacity: It’s one half of the raw capacity for normal redundancy and one third for high redundancy. The normal redundancy as on the picture safeguards against the loss of any one disk.

ASM Basics: Spare capacity

When disks are lost, ASM tries to re-establish redundancy again. Instead of using spare disks, it uses spare capacity. If enough free space…